Thursday, September 30, 2010

Many people have been looking for a compact phone, small enough to not be a burden in the pocket, but powerful enough to play the smartphone game. So here it is, the Samsung I5500. This phone looks like a S3650 Corby copycat. It inherits the good looks, shape and size of the Corby, but packs Android 2.1 and a more than sufficient 600MHz CPU. The Android specific keys have been added to the Corby design and also a little bit of chrome around the edges, as well as on the menu key. The I5500 packs a 2.8 inch capacitive display, with a 240x320 resolution. The downside of the resolution is that there won't be many apps available for this low resolution.

This new intelligent Corby joins phones such as HTC Tatoo or Xperia X10 Mini in the run for compact size smartphones market, but it may win in the price category. All the connectivity is there, but the camera seems to be the same as the Corby's 2MP shutter, which is one of the downsides of the phone.

But the Corby similarities stop here, and the Android experience begins.

The TouchWiz interface is present and the phone feels like any other Samsung Android, but scaled down to size.

A downside of the Android running Corby is the on-screen QWERTY keyboard, which is pretty hard to use. A classic alphanumeric keypad is more likely to be successful on this phone.

All in all, this may be yet another Samsung hit, if it gets updated on a regular basis, because with every new Android release, the UI gets faster.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

UPDATE: A it turns your HyperX only managed to "overclock" the CPU speed reporting. He did however overclock his Omnia HD to speeds up to 1GHz, from the original 600MHz.

A famous modder HyperX has managed to overclock the Nokia 5230 ARM11 434MHz CPU to 800MHz. Using ROMPatcher Plus he manages to set the speed of the ARM11 CPU to variable speeds from 250MHz, which means a very long battery life for those who don't need much processing power, to a stunning 800MHz for the hardcore users. However, it's a big probability that your CPU's life will be very short if set at 800MHz so a more friendly value of 600MHz is advised. No one knows for sure what the maximum speed of this ARM11 is, but many suspect it's 680MHz, while others think it's 528MHz. Anyhow, 600MHz is a big improvement for the 5230's users.This first successful overclocking raises the question of weather the Symbian bootloader was cracked to achieve these values, and if so, what's next? Android on Nokias maybe?Here is the video where HyperX demoes not only the overclocking but the Nokia C6 firmware running on his Nokia 5230.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

The Bada developer challenge results have been published. Most apps selected were games and entertainment apps. This seems a little weird, but it looks like Samsung wants the Bada OS to be an entertainment/gaming platform. That's OK, but I for one thought that Bada was about more than that. As I said in a previous post, Bada is gonna be as good as the Samsung Apps will be, and if you want a gameboy-like-phone then it's OK, otherwise you may want to take another look at Android, iOS and Windows Phone. This is a huge letdown for me. As I read in the challenge forums, there were hardly a handful of apps that are productivity related. So if you plan to buy a phone for business use, you better look elsewhere. Even though Samsung announced a Bada powered QWERTY slider, I don't see how gaming would make sense on such a device.Anyway, if that's where they're going with Bada I wish them good luck. Even though I was planning to develop some more productivity apps for Bada, I have to let it go, because clearly this isn't the audience Samsung wants for Bada phones.

The next one, the Nokia C7, is a candybar smartphone with a 3.5 inch screen, which seems more appropriate for the nHD resolution. It;s got only 8GB of built-in storage, but it's expandable, unlike the E7, trough an SD card slot.

Nokia C7

The last of the bunch is the Nokia C6-01 which is the cheapest of the bunch, with only a 3.2 inch screen, and it's a bit thicker than the the C7.

Nokia C6-01

All three smartphones run S^3 and most probably have 680 MHz CPU's on board. This, for me, means that Nokia is trying to pull another fast one on it's users, because they launch these phones with these specs, while the S^4 OS that they'll release next year has a 1GHz CPU requirement. So, are you willing to spend 300-400 Euros on a phone that will be outdated in 6 months. I wouldn't.

Update:On October 21st Nokia announced that their Symbian will be an evolving OS, meaning that there will be no more S^3 and S^4, but only Symbian, and the current Symbian(formerly S^3) will receive progressive updates until it reaches the user interface originally planned for S^4.

As I wrote last month, I tried to get a reaction from the Nokia forum officials, regarding some threads where people were treated badly by some forum "Experts". Initially I thought that something will happen because I got an answer like "I'll investigate this" from Nokia Ron, who seems to be the forum administrator. As you can see from the link below, I did not.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Today's GSMArena rankings (September 1st 2010), show the Samsung Wave rated at 9.059 our of 10, with 51,399 votes. The Wave if followed by two more Samsung phones, the Galaxy S at number 2 with a rating of 8.800 and the Omnia HD at number 3 with a rating of 8.748.

The other phones in the top 5 are the HTC Desire and the HTC HD2.

It seems there is a growing interest for Samsung phones, especially the Bada-powered Wave, which should help Bada grow a pretty decent appstore in a short while. With the Bada Challenge simulator submission phase, I expect a shipload of apps to hit the Samsung Apps website as soon as the results with the first 300 come in on September 16th.